EXHIBIT WILL BE POSTED ONLINE SOON!

In the meantime, You can check out the show on our preview site below:

Kazuki Takamatsu

Preview link: https://coreyhelfordgallery.smugmug.com/KAZUKI-TAKAMATSU-2023

password: era23

Corey Helford Gallery proudly presents Kazuki Takamatsu's new exhibition, Parallelization Era. 

Takamatsu shares: “This exhibition is a group of works that expresses the parallel processing of human beings, who use multiple brains to derive a single answer at high speed. In recent years, I feel that we don’t for ourselves but rather we ask the internet all our questions. We’ve entered an age in which we can share answers that feel good to us with someone we don't even know. It’s as if there are many alter egos of you all over the world and it’s not only for humans, it could also be AI. You will be given answers one after another, answers that you have never experienced, what you should do in the future, and even what you should buy. I feel a strange sense of wonder in this age where efficiency is so important that we no longer worry about a single answer and think deeply about it. Someone is a part of me, and I am a part of someone else.” 

About Kazuki Takamatsu:

Kazuki Takamatsu was born in Sendai, Japan in 1978. From a country known both for its picturesque landscapes and for its extremely high suicide rate, his work aims to highlight this duality of enchanting beauty and dreadful sadness.

Takamatsu attended the “Oil Painting” faculty at the renowned Tohoku University of Art and Design, where he graduated in 2001. He currently lives and works in his hometown, Sendai, known for having been nearly completely destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami Tohoku in 2011. Takamatsu’s work still presents a clear connection to those catastrophic events, and his work creates beautiful hybrids of pain and hope, luring the viewer into a never-ending spiral of emotions.

To create his beautiful pieces, Takamatsu uses a technique known as “depth-mapping” while also getting inspiration for his subjects from the classic Japanese manga girls. Depth-mapping is a mixed media technique that consists of the combination of classical drawing, airbrush, graphics and gouache hand painting. This process makes it so that every single pixel appears as a specific shade of grey which is proportional to the distance the viewer sees it from. Thanks to this technique Takamatsu is able to give his work an incredible amount of depth and surrealism. His monochromatic Lolitas are born in a study and they are then shaped through infinite shades and tones of whites and greys, to emerge from an abysmal depth into the breathtaking compositions that are Takamatsu’s final pieces.

Takamatsu expresses these principles through dark, violent narratives of melancholic floating infant figures holding tightly onto symbolic objects such as skulls or weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, his Lolita’s are depicted in poses of mesmerizing innocence creating a surreal dimension where every corner could be hiding either the most warming light or the most ruthless darkness. The artworks are clearly profuse with the artist’s empathy and sensitivity and as he mentions in an interview: “Each and every one of the layers in my paintings represents a distance where there isn’t any shade or any light, an environment in which you can explore dark themes such as death and the current social conditions.”